Breadcrumb

Koch backed lawyer and Euro climate denial

Fakenomics: European 'sceptic' and climate denier Benny Peiser teamed up with Washington lawyer Chris Horner to bring down the Kyoto Protocol.

In January 2005, this small group of sceptics met at the Royal Institution in London, which the Guardian identifies as the UK’s first dedicated meeting of climate sceptics

Benny Peiser was working with Julian Morris at his free market think tank, the International Policy Network (IPN) even before teaming up with Lord Lawson at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And, at the same time, Peiser was an advisor of the IPN’s rival British denier organisation, the Scientific Alliance.

The Scientific Alliance worked closely with the Virginia-based George Marshall Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded free market think tank that can claim to be among the first to attack the science of climate change.

In 2004, the British and American groups collaborated on a booklet they called Climate Issues and Questions which, once again, attacked climate science and strongly emphasised the uncertainties.

'Eminent scientists'

The following year, the Scientific Alliance put out the pamphlet Apocalypse No: Assessing Catastrophic Climate Change, with contributions from the usual suspects - including Peiser, Richard Lindzen, senior fellow at the Koch-funded CATO institute, and Fred Singer, head of the sceptic Science and Environment Policy Project.

The publican claimed to “raise awareness about scientific uncertainties surrounding the supposed consensus on climate change, and produce a challenge to the international process behind the Kyoto Protocol, by raising a number of pertinent questions.”

In January 2005, this small group of deniers met at the Royal Institution in London, which the Guardian identifies as the UK’s “first dedicated meeting of climate sceptics.”

Peiser was among the speakers and bemoaned the fact that climate change was blamed for everything since the fall of the Mayan civilisation to the 2003 heatwave. “It is important for people to know there are eminent scientists who don’t share this viewpoint,” he said at the time.

By 'eminent scientists' he was perhaps referring again to Singer and Lindzen, who were also speaking at the Scientific Alliance meeting. Singer used the opportunity to attack the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for scaring people about CO2. “Carbon dioxide is a plant food and makes them grow faster,” he said without a hint of irony.

The following day, Chris Horner, a Washington lawyer and senior fellow at the Koch and Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) - with Myron Ebell, the CEI’s director of energy and global warming policy, and CEI founder Fred Smith - set out plans for a new climate sceptic European policy think tank and drafted a funding proposal for the energy giant RWE.

Leaked emails

Horner believes that this private printed email and PowerPoint presentation were stolen from his trash. The memo was faxed to the Guardian in London by Greenpeace US activists, with a cover sheet exclaiming: “US Republican lobbyists’ secret plan to derail Kyoto, dirty tricks campaign planned for Europe”.

Horner detailed his plans to establish a European Sound Climate Policy Coalition and argued: “In the US an informal coalition has helped successfully to avert adoption of a Kyoto-style program. This model should be emulated, as appropriate, to guide similar efforts in Europe.”

The Washington lawyer appears to have been making the case for RWE, a German utility company, to fund the think tank. He explained that industry associations were not the best weapon in the war against Kyoto, so a cross-industry coalition of six companies – each paying €10,000 – was the prescribed modus operandi.

Europe was an “opportunity” Horner enthused, adding that it “would be like Neil Armstrong, it’s a developing untapped frontier” and that “US companies need someone they can trust, and it’s just a den of thieves over there.”

RWE confirmed they had met with Horner, but claimed that they had not taken his bait. Horner, after his email and presentation was leaked, would have to abandon or seriously revise his plan for a European think tank.

Perhaps Peiser reflected on alternative words for “climate” and “coalition” in founding his new global warming policy group.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Help us keep The Ecologist working for the planet

The Ecologist website is a free service, published by The Resurgence Trust, a UK-based educational charity. We work hard - with a small budget and tiny editorial team - to bring you the wide-ranging, independent journalism we know you value and enjoy, but we need your help. Please make a donation to support The Ecologist platform. Thank you!

Share this article

About the author

Channel

Tags

Latest Edition

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist is out now, and available to buy from the Resurgence Trust website.

ABOUT US

The Ecologist is the world’s leading environmental affairs platform.

Our aim is to educate and inform as many people as possible about the wonders of nature, the crisis we face and the best solutions and methods in managing that crisis. Find out about our mission, and our team, here. The website is owned and published by The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity. To receive the magazine, become a member now. The views expressed in the articles published on this site may not necessarily reflect those of the trust, its trustees or its staff.